In the 30 years since deranged fan Mark Chapman gunned down John Lennon outside the Dakota Building in New York, every second of that fateful day has been analysed to within an inch of its life.
So was there anywhere for The Day That John Lennon Died (ITV1) to go? This 30th anniversary tribute rounded up the memories of the staff from the recording studio where he’d spent the day with the radio DJ who’d been granted what turned out to be Lennon’s final interview, and much of it wore a cloak of familiarity.
However, this wasn’t just another cheap excuse to pick over the bones of a dead icon: it felt like a sincere attempt to keep a memory alive. That wasn’t down to Liam Gallagher’s trademark ‘know worr I mean’ line in inarticulacy, or the radio reporter whose eyes shone as he sensed he’d got ‘a really, really big story’.
It was the lump-in-throat recollections of the much-vilified Yoko Ono which lifted this report way above your standard cut-and-paste profile.
There was a candour about Ono here that caught you off guard, an open quality which, if she’d shown that in the early days of her romance with Lennon, might have changed the way the public ? and Beatles fans ? felt about her. As she recalled how she felt in the hospital while she struggled to come to terms with the horror of what had happened, three decades went into reverse and the nightmare of her pain was sharp and apparent. It brought the loss of Lennon back into sharp focus, and took me back to his records afresh, which was surely the point.